Radio Design and Coordination forWireless Industrial Automation

Abstract:
Although wireless communication offers several advantages over wired systems, it has not been successfully applied to mission-critical industrial automation applications such as packaging and robotics. This can be attributed to the fact that existing wireless systems are neither able to fully address the scalability needs of industrial deployments nor the stringent latency and reliability requirements of industrial automation applications. In this paper, we present a two-tier radio coordination system that (i) on one tier allows the scalable coordination of multiple radio cells potentially running with heterogeneous technologies and (ii) on the second tier allows low-latency and high reliability communication as needed by mission-critical industrial automation applications. In particular, we discuss the rationale behind our system design and its entities. While most of the existing research focuses on communication solutions using a single technology typically running only in the unlicensed spectrum, we show that our coordination system supports scalable and heterogeneous deployments. Furthermore, we present details on how different radio latency and reliability features can be configured such that varying requirements among different industrial applications can be satisfied. Paired with our coordination framework, it provides a solution vital for practical industry deployments.